Gulf spill blamed on poor management decisions

BP said in a statement that the British company accepts the report’s conclusion that the accident was the result of multiple causes involving multiple parties. BP did not address the report’s specific conclusions about the cement.

“From the outset, BP acknowledged its role in the accident and has taken concrete steps to further enhance safety and risk management throughout its global operations, including the implementation of new voluntary standards and practices in the Gulf of Mexico that exceed current regulatory requirements and strengthen the oversight of contractors,” BP said. “We continue to encourage other parties to acknowledge their roles in the accident and make changes to help prevent similar accidents in the future.

Transocean and cement contractor Halliburton did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The report paints a dark portrait of the final hours aboard the Deepwater Horizon, where the workers in the most danger — on the drilling floor at the center of the rig — were unaware of the anomalies being detected by engineers looking at data coming from the well. The federal team also charges that BP made decisions blindly, without assessing risk, and in some cases skipping internal processes the company relied on to evaluate the potential dangers of decisions.

While this report and others blame BP for jeopardizing safety to cut costs, the federal panel went further and examined the 2009 performance evaluations of 13 BP employees involved on the Macondo well. All but one of the reviews cited cost savings when evaluating the employee’s work.

In addition to the rig worker deaths, the resulting oil spill off Louisiana spewed more than 200 million gallons of crude from an undersea well owned by BP. The disaster caused billions of dollars in damage to hundreds of miles of coastline and wreaked havoc on the Gulf economy.

The report pins the causes for the disaster on many of the same faulty decisions found by previous probes, including those by the president’s independent oil spill commission, Congressional committees and the companies themselves. But it is likely to carry more weight in Congress, where Republican lawmakers in particular have said they are unwilling to adopt reforms until the federal investigation was complete.

Since the disaster, the Obama administration has reorganized the offshore drilling agency and boosted safety regulations. But Congress has yet to pass a single piece of legislation to address safety gaps highlighted by the disaster.

While the federal investigative team lays blame on decisions made by the companies, it does not address the government’s own role in approving some of the questionable decisions. The federal agency that oversees offshore drilling signed off on many of the calls made by the companies, sometimes in minutes, and accepted an outdated and erroneous oil spill plan for the well that discussed protecting species that did not even exist in the Gulf of Mexico.

House Natural Resources Chairman Doc Hastings, R-Wash., who has pushed legislation to vastly expand offshore drilling since the disaster, said he hoped the federal government’s conclusions would give lawmakers a clearer picture about what happened.

“We have waited far too long for this report, but the Committee is ready to take action,” Hastings said. “I’m confident that with a far more complete reporting of the facts, we will be able to take a thoughtful approach to real reforms to ensure continued safe American energy production.”